1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sheet delivery apparatus for delivering a sheet to a delivery tray.
2. Related Background Art
A conventional sheet delivery apparatus is as shown in FIG. 15. A sheet transported along a transport guide 201 is nipped and conveyed by a nip portion of a pair of transport rollers (transport upper roller 202 and transport lower roller 203) and is delivered onto a delivery tray 204. At this time, in order to deliver the sheet with reliability by preventing a trailing end of the sheet from leaning against a standing wall 205 of the stacking tray 204 or the transport lower roller 203, a disk 207 having projection portions 206 is provided. The disk 207 rotates in an interlocked manner with the transport lower roller 203 and the projection portions 206 protrude from the outer peripheral surface of the transport lower roller 203 or the standing wall 205. With this construction, at the time of the delivery of the sheet, the projection portions 206 push out the trailing end of the sheet and kick down the sheet trailing end to the delivery tray, thereby preventing the sheet from leaning against the transport lower roller 203 or the standing wall 205 (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-059255, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-267584).
With the conventional technique described above, however, there occurs the following problem.
The projection portions 206 described above are originally provided to kick out the trailing end of the sheet and also kick down the trailing end of the sheet to the delivery tray 204. However, this construction results in a situation in which during the transport of the sheet along the transport guide 201 by the transport upper roller 202 and the transport lower roller 203, the projection portions 206 beat the sheet at all times. Therefore, there occurs a problem in that during the sheet transport, periodic sound is produced at all times.